Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally in the area of educational toys for children, and specifically relates to a system and method of teaching phonics involving physical manipulatives as well as software.
Description of Related Art
Children learning to read are often encouraged to use phonics to “sound out” letters in a word. This helps the child understand the sounds made by different letters and thus assimilate the rules of English spelling and pronunciation. Since children are physical learners and respond well to tactile stimulation, many manipulatives exist for the purpose of teaching reading—alphabet blocks, letter-shaped magnets, and other similar things. A child using such toys can learn the shape of the letters by touch as well as by sight and thus learn them better.
English is not entirely a phonetic language, and thus many complex rules exist for the pronunciation of different letter combinations. For example, the “ough” in “cough” is not pronounced the same way as the “ough” in “through”, and the “c” in “cat” is not pronounced the same way as the “c” in “cot”. A child learning how to read in English is therefore at a disadvantage compared to a child learning to read Russian or Hebrew or any other language with phonetic spelling.
Since most adults know the rules of pronunciation implicitly rather than explicitly, a child's parent would be able to sound out a random combination of letters put together by the child—for example, “CAG”—without necessarily knowing why the combination is pronounced that way. Repeated over time and many different letter combinations, this game of “pronounce a random combination of letters” will eventually result in the child learning the rules of English spelling and pronunciation implicitly and becoming a very confident and solid reader.
While this game is very useful, it is also highly time-consuming for the adult participants. Most adults do not have the time or the interest to spend hours pronouncing random nonsense.
Several educational toys exist on the market for teaching proper spelling. Such toys typically provide alphabet blocks or letter-shaped manipulatives that a child can arrange on a board; a computer is connected to a sensor network and picks up the location of the letters. The computer is then able to display the letters on the screen and to determine whether or not the child spelled a word correctly. However, such toys typically do not have an exploratory component—i.e. they do not encourage the child to just throw random combination of letters together and find out what they sound like; typically, they merely tell the child whether his/her spelling is “right” or “wrong”. At best, such toys pronounce individual letters and the sounds made by individual letters; however, this is not very useful to a child who wants to know what THUSCHIEKO (or some similar random combination of letters that contains phonemes made up of several letters) will sound like.
A need therefore exists for a toy that encourages the learning of phonics by determining the pronunciation of random combinations of letters made by the child.